Canción del esposo soldado

I have peopled your belly with love and seed,

I have prolonged the echo of blood to which I respond

and I rest above the furrow as the plough rests:

I have reached the deepest point.

Dark-haired woman of high towers, high light and high eyes,

wife of my skin, great drink of my life,

your maddened breasts jump towards me

like an unborn hind.

You seem to me to be a delicate glass,

I fear that you will break at the slightest touch,

and I will reinforce your veins with my soldier’s skin

like a bursting cherry tree.

Mirror of my flesh, sustenance of my wings,

I give you life in the death they give me, and which I do not accept.

My love, my love, I love you beseiged by bullets,

sought out by lead.

Upon the ferocious coffins, lying in wait,

upon the dead themselves, without hope nor grave,

I love you, and I yearn to kiss you with my breast

deep in the dust, my love.

When by the fields of combat I think of you,

and your face does not cool nor soothe my brow,

you come towards me like a huge mouth

of hungry teeth.

Write to me in the battle, sense me in the trenches:

here with my gun I invoke and concentrate on your name,

and I defend your poor woman’s belly which waits for me,

and I defend your child.

Our child will be born with its fist clenched,

wrapped in a clamour of victory and guitars,

and I will leave at your door my soldier’s life

with its fangs and claws.

It is necessary to kill to keep on living.

One day I will come to the shade of your far-away hair,

and I will sleep on the starched, crackling sheet

sewn by your hand.

Your unrelenting legs go straight towards birth,

and your unrelenting mouth with its untamable lips,

and whilst I am in a solitude of explosions and breakthroughs

you tread a path of unrelenting kisses.

The peace that I am forging will be for our child.

And in the end, your heart and mine will shipwreck

in an ocean of inevitable bones, and all that remains will be

a woman and a man worn out with kisses.